How is removing gender options more inclusive though? Unicode now has modifiers for male, female, and gender neutral, whereas this only has gender neutral. Overall this seems mainly focused on...
How is removing gender options more inclusive though? Unicode now has modifiers for male, female, and gender neutral, whereas this only has gender neutral.
Overall this seems mainly focused on furries, which means it has a rather limited target audience, and is likely to turn off anyone not in that audience.
because it's not actually supposed to compete with unicode in the sense that it intends to displace it so much as present a world that isn't just whatever the fuck is encoded in the unicode...
because it's not actually supposed to compete with unicode in the sense that it intends to displace it so much as present a world that isn't just whatever the fuck is encoded in the unicode standard. in fact, it's explicitly designed so as to not be able to be easily capitalized on by business interests and corporations and to be as diverse and representative as possible against what is deemed normal or socially acceptable by ordinary people.
Mutant Standard was created in 2017 partly to exist as a counterpoint and a wedge to the centralised and commercialised world of Unicode emoji.
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While today, Unicode is an industry group that has a degree separation from the corporations that support it, emoji adoption and interest has always largely been driven by corporations. Corporations are also ultimately the groups that create the emoji pictures, which is just as important a role as Unicode's in selecting what designs to make in the first place.
Despite their own claims to the contrary, corporations are abstract entities made to produce profit and nothing else. As such, they are not adequate caretakers of culture, and should not be charged with the responsibility of influencing it like they do. Yet, as a part of culture, emoji is another means with which people can be culturally influenced.
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The world is not a finite, concrete entity. There is not just one way of seeing it. However, with the way it's presented to us, Unicode emoji often embodies this ignorance. It not only contains a narrow version of the world, but also embodies the status quo - which today means a brutal and failing world. Mutant Standard as a project, by what it creates and what it advocates, aims to engage with the challenging, difficult, awful aspects of our time, instead of sitting on the sidelines or worsening it like many tech companies do. It aims to provide a more unusual, more thoughtful and more altruistic vision of the world, because the world needs nothing less at this point in time.
It will be considered for the next release, which will occur in the first quarter of next year. Davis says “the odds are quite good” that it will be approved.
Related and maybe worthy of its own topic: Mutant Standard Emoji, an ongoing attempt to build a more inclusive and competing-to-unicode emoji set.
How is removing gender options more inclusive though? Unicode now has modifiers for male, female, and gender neutral, whereas this only has gender neutral.
Overall this seems mainly focused on furries, which means it has a rather limited target audience, and is likely to turn off anyone not in that audience.
because it's not actually supposed to compete with unicode in the sense that it intends to displace it so much as present a world that isn't just whatever the fuck is encoded in the unicode standard. in fact, it's explicitly designed so as to not be able to be easily capitalized on by business interests and corporations and to be as diverse and representative as possible against what is deemed normal or socially acceptable by ordinary people.
to quote the Principles of Mutant Standard:
i am familiar with this, actually! primarily because it's what a lot of mastodon instances use for some of their custom emojis
This is good news!